flynn082

It is time DCPS started playing the game Spoiler alert, I did not care for former superintendent Vitti, okay not much of a spoiler, and I won’t go into the reasons here, and instead I will pay him a bit of a compliment. That guy could play the game. He changed entire schools around in order to beat the test and change their school grades. Below are some of the changes he made. From the Times Union Making new magnet or specialized schools from Andrew Jackson High (computer science, robotics), Wolfson High (international studies), Ed White High (military), A. Philip Randolph High (vocational trades), Matthew Gilbert Middle (medical magnet), Stilwell Middle (performing arts) and Northwestern Middle (vocational trade or performing arts) Changing Oak Hill Elementary into an autism center and R.L. Brown into a gifted and talented school Creating primary schools - for preschool through second grades - at West Jacksonville, Long Branch, and Hyde Grove elementaries while converting Hyde Park to...

There is a lot of debate if we should build the wall, err arm teachers.   Well what happened today in Jacksonville should be exhibit number one why it is a bad idea. From First Coast News, A middle school on the Westside was briefly locked down Thursday after a false threat was made to the school and a Jacksonville Sheriff's Officer accidentally fired their weapon, school officials said. Duval County Public Schools said the false threat was made to JSO and claimed Jefferson Davis Middle School was in danger. The school was then briefly placed on lockdown while police investigated.  While officers investigated the campus, DCPS said a JSO officer's firearm was accidentally discharged outside the school.  Despite the incident, the school district told parents, "at no time was there a threat to our campus, and staff and students remained safe throughout the day." JSO is now investigating the incident in which the weapon was discharged, according to school district offic...

I am going to lay some knowledge on you if you  are young or new to Jacksonville. The city used to stink, I mean literally and really, really stink. We dumped garbage into the river like it was our job and we had the paper plant on the Northside of town, which belched noxious fumes that would put even your uncle Larry to shame, and where he can clear a room, the paper plant cleared a quarter of the county.  Furthermore forty years ago there was nothing on the water front except ship yards, and they didn’t do much for the aesthetic feel of Jax either. Back then when DCPS cleaned up the polluted spot where the school board building now sits they were considered heroes for putting the building down there and bringing in workers. Fast forward to today and things have changed a bit, we have the district now and builds are coming fast and furious to downtown and whether deserved or not the school board building has become a symbol for all that’s wrong with the district. People think...

On Tuesday on a party line vote the republicans in the senate education committee advanced legislation calling to arm teachers. This is Florida’s “build the wall” moment, because like that boondoggle if we used reason and facts nobody would want to have anything to do with arming teachers. I can see people in red MAGA hats yelling, arm the teachers, over and over again. Statistically speaking guns make us less safe and I know that will come as a surprise to all the people carrying weapons waiting for their Nokatomi Towers, type movement. Study after study shows more guns do not stop crime and makes people less safe. https://www. scientificamerican.com/ article/more-guns-do-not-stop- more-crimes-evidence-shows/ https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/zm5xvy/guns-make-you- and-your-family-less-safe-not- more Guns Make You and Your Family Less Safe, Not More - VICE www.vice.com Whether guns are actually effective protection tools has of course been the subject of fierce debate and many studie...

Be careful if you decide to read his op-ed, the hubris flows off it and may create a mess. Darryl Willie loves Teach for America which takes non education majors and puts them through a five-week boot camp and then into our neediest schools where they are supposed to serve two years, assuring our neediest kids have an ever revolving door of novice teachers, or you know the exact opposite of what they need. He stops just short of giving Teach for America all the credit for any success the district may have  had over the years, but just short.   Not once does he say words like, in conjunction with, working with, working alongside, and then professional teachers. I imagine if an archaeologist were to find this op-ed and read it, they would think all we had were TFA teachers in our classrooms, when the reality is at their heyday they counted for about 4 percent of DCPS’s teachers, four percent, at their heyday. This year the district brought in just 18, sort of.  ...

DeSantis once again made a big splash in the education world, and for those counting at home this was the third one. After the expansion of vouchers (a terrible idea) and the end of Common Core (not a practical one) he meandered his way to teacher pay where he proposed 422 million dollars in a gimmick filled proposal that falls apart after five minutes of critical thinking. Now DeSantis is correct in his overarching idea that teachers need to be paid more, after all even this late into the game we still have thousands of openings statewide and the problem is only going to get worse, it's just his idea to fix the problem is terrible. First he is proposing a bonus when teachers really need a raise. Florida is one of the worst in the nation when it comes to teacher salaries and its teachers have been loosing ground for over a decade especially its veteran teachers. Then it's just a bonus for 45k teachers (maybe, more on that in a minute), leaving the vast majority of teachers out ...

Kudos to School Board district 4 member Darryl Willie for stepping down from Teach for America but that's just step one. First look at this chart: Duval District Grade 08-09 09-10 10-11 11-12 12-13 13-14 14-15 15-16 16-17 17-18 B B B B C C C B B TFA corp members by year 55 42 60 60 101 101 92 78 54 50 * 23.8/ 60.2 15.0/ 51 31.7/ 60.9 23.3/ 67.9 *  Percentage of TFA and non TFA teachers returning for their third years A December 2013 report said TFA was the number one factor exacerbating teacher turnover. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/ddr2111/faculty-profile/files/FINAL_TFA_DUVAL.pdf It shows that the more Teach for America corp members we had the worse the district did. Now you shouldn't think for an instant that this chart is the end all be all. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of factors that go into determining a district grade, but undoubtedly one of those has to be teaching experience, and the bottom line is experience, what TFA completely discounts, matters...

This is from the Gardiner Parent handbook https://www.stepupforstudents.org/wp-content/uploads/Gardiner-Parent-Handbook.pdf First faxing? Um, it's 2019 who does that? So say I am poor just barely making it, my child has a significant disability and I am not happy with my public school, so I apply for the scholarship, and I get the money put into their account. If I have to pay out of pocket, the thing is its not going to happen. Now I get it, maybe I can have some of the service providers submit invoices, but does this system seem like its set up for poor kids from poor families, i.e. the ones who could probably use it the most? It sure doesn't seem like it to me. Sigh, welcome to Florida where those kids who need it the most often get it the least. I wrote this five years ago and it seems like not much has changed. I am not a fan of school vouchers for a multitude of reasons and I am also a proud member of one of the state's teacher unions and despite this I had some tre...